The Blog

Disney has updated its park hours yet again. This time all of the changes were made to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, which is unusual as far as park hour updates go. All changes were made to the closing times, and the new times are spread from the end of October through March of 2012. Disney’s Animal Kingdom will now close no earlier than 6pm on most days over the next 6 months.

The park hours on TouringPlans.com will be updated very soon. Please keep checking Touring Plans for all upcoming changes to Walt Disney World’s park hours.

For all of the complaining we do about “they keep taking stuff away”, I’ve decided to start being more positive about these announcements.
This makes me kind of happy. I’ve never been able to go on the safari or Everest at dusk, and earlier sunsets in the fall and winter will make this possible!
We need to stop complaining when they give us something we didn’t expect. Sure, an extra hour of Epcot would be nice, but that wasn’t an option, was it? Out of nowhere they gave us something extra.
Reminds me of the reaction of the Avatar announcement. Sure, we ALL would have preferred The Muppets or Lord Of The Rings, but those options were never presented! We didn’t know, or expect any kind of expansion of Animal Kingdom, which we all can agree NEEDS expansion. Out of the blue they announce that they’re giving us an entire new land… and all we can think about is how much we’d rather have something else!
THIS IS A GOOD THING, PEOPLE!!!

For the record, many of us would NOT have preferred a Muppets or LOTR land. Not by a long shot. Especially as an addition to the Animal Kingdom, which let’s face it needs the expansion more than any other park (even though it’s my favorite park at WDW).

I think this is great too! And, I would NOT be interested in Muppet land or Lord of the Rings either…Avatar sounds great to me. Its a movie we all enjoyed and my DD10 still rewatches. I think it will make a great land. I love AK and am glad its “expanding”. Its always my last day choice since it can be done from 9 – 2 p.m. and most things seen.

I saw the same thing on my dates in Dec. Perhaps the model needs adjustments since it was only the AK park that increased? All the other parks stayed flat yet this jumped from a 1.3 to 5.7. No way! I’m sure its just a model calculation that drove that without considering future changes that will be taking place. Hoping TP can look at these please? Pretty Please? 🙂

We do take into account that many of the park hours will change, but Animal Kingdom does not usually change during the off season (only 12% of the time in fact). Therefore the prediction model saw an abnormal increase in AK park hours and assumed that meant high crowds are coming.

In reality, we aren’t exactly sure yet why the hours were increased. My personal thought is that it may be a response to the increased press coverage for AK due to the Avatar announcement, but that is just a theory.

I see some of the hours on Disney’s park calendar updated to 7pm closing times, but didn’t see any formal announcement. Curiously, we are planning on visiting AK on November 12th, and saw the crowd calendar jump frm a 2.8 to now a 6.9, but that is one day where the calendar still lists 5pm as the closing. I’m confused as to why that crowd projection jumped even though it is not scheduled to be open later that day. Is the 5pm closing incorrect on the calendar? What would be the official source of park hours if not that?